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Raiders of the Lost Privy

The author’s West Village backyard as it looks today.Credit
Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times

On a sunny afternoon in March 2005, Diana diZerega Wall, a professor of anthropology at City College, stood in my West Village garden, pointing to a low wall that ran along the back perimeter. Part of it would need to be removed, she said. “You understand,” she added, “that we are not bricklayers. We cannot put the wall back.” I smiled, appreciatively. No one was confusing her with a bricklayer, I assured her.

Wall, who also happened to be my boyfriend’s mother, had designed a spring-semester course — the methods and techniques of archaeological fieldwork — based on artifacts she hoped to find by digging up my 20-by-30-foot yard. She and her assistants had deposited the tools of their trade in my basement — a ladder, shovels, screens, scrapers, Ziploc baggies and large sheets of plywood for shoring up the walls of the hole they would dig outside. Before the team broke ground, she wanted to discuss the parameters of her project. The brick patio would need to be removed, she said, in an area about eight feet in diameter. Because the digging would go as deep as 10 feet, the excavated dirt would need to be piled somewhere. Wall suggested a small area between the garden and the stairway leading to the deck, where a lilac basked in a tiny patch of sunlight. A forsythia with lovely yellow blooms, I told Wall, was the sole survivor from the people I bought the house from in 1997. I also mentioned two trees for which I felt a special fondness: a Japanese maple and a birch. Wall’s expression clouded. “We’ll try not to kill the trees,” she said. “The forsythia, I don’t know. That might be tricky.”

“I’m sure you’ve done this before,” I said, with a mixture of apprehension and trust that a person might feel for her surgeon. Yes, she said. “But I wanted to explain all of this in person, because I think of us as friends, and my goal, if you see what I mean, is that we’re still friends when this is over.”

The story of how an academic archaeologist wound up in my backyard is long and complicated — and personal, as matters of the heart and the earth tend to be. Five years earlier, in 2000, Wall used electromagnetic waves and ground-penetrating radar to examine a grassy area of Central Park near the Great Lawn, where an African-American community known as Seneca Village was believed to have stood. But what she really wanted to do was dig. “If we can actually do some archaeology, we will be able to say something about how people were living there that cannot be discovered in any other way,” she told The Times. Since her proposed Central Park dig had yet to gain approval, Wall began to cast around for other projects. That was around the time that her son, Alexis Rockman, mentioned my West Village property.

At the time, I was in an unhappy marriage, with two young boys. Alexis, an artist, was just a friend. Wall asked Alexis to ask me if my property had ever been excavated. I didn’t think so. William Burroughs once lived here, and Alexis promised that if his mother were to dig up my yard, she would keep an eye out for any unpublished manuscripts. Wall’s interest in my property gave me a sense of a larger world of possibilities beyond the life that was so difficult then.

In early October 2001, a couple of weeks after my husband and I separated, Wall and I walked to Lower Manhattan to discuss the Sept. 11 disaster zone as an emergent archaeological site. The article I wrote about it, Wall told me later, impressed her. A few months after that, Alexis mentioned that his mother told him that of all of his female friends, I was her “favorite.”

Wall wouldn’t get serious about excavating my yard for a few more years, and in the meantime, Alexis and I became romantically involved. In the fall of 2004, a few months before his mother surveyed my garden, Alexis moved his cats into my house, and we began living together.

Wall’s first goal when she started to dig was to locate the privy. Identified at ground level by a circle of stones, privies — also known as outhouses — were in common use in Manhattan until the mid-19th century, according to Wall, when households transitioned to indoor plumbing. At that time, these cavities, which burrowed downward like wells, became dumping grounds for refuse — broken crockery, bedpans, urns, clay pipes, combs, glass bottles. Together these objects offered a kind of time capsule for the domestic rituals, religious beliefs, social status, even the dietary habits of a given property’s early occupants. Small test digs supported Wall’s conviction: an archaeological treasure trove was very likely buried beneath my garden. Digging days were set for weekends, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. I provided her with a key, so she could come and go at will.

It did not take long for me to understand that my backyard was no longer really mine. It and everything growing there belonged to Wall and her historical quest. One afternoon, she declared that “a holly near the center of the back flower bed needs to be moved,” and it summarily was. Within weeks, there was no semblance of a garden left, just dirt and debris.

When the crew struck the outer wall of the privy, however, I was momentarily buoyed. The curve, Wall showed me, suggested a structure even bigger than she expected, necessitating an even larger hole. The practical implications of this — the mess would be bigger, there would be more dirt — seemed moot. That my privy was a big privy felt like a badge of honor.

The damages, meanwhile, mounted. “We broke a pot,” Wall announced to me and Alexis one afternoon. “We’re very sorry.”

Photo

A selection of items found in the author’s yard.Credit
Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times

“Does City College have a reparations budget?” Alexis asked.

“No, they do not,” his mother snapped. Then she turned to me. “But we do want you to know that we’re very sorry.”

Over the following weeks, my enthusiasm for Wall’s dig waned in direct proportion to the rising piles of dirt and the lengthening list of damages. A bleeding heart and an azalea were early casualties. If City College’s budget for the dig didn’t even cover a $30 ceramic pot, who was going to pay to have my garden put back?

When I mentioned this to Alexis, he said that something would be worked out, but he couldn’t tell me what or how. I reminded him that he had presented the dig as an opportunity for me: “I don’t want to tell you what you should do,” he told me at one point. Then, laughing, he added, “But I think you should do it.” Another time, he said, “I would understand if you said no. . . .” Noticing that I was seriously considering that option, he quickly interjected, “I just think it would be so interesting for you and the boys.”

One night, as the dig dragged on, I went out with an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in years. I started telling her about my relationship with Alexis, his mother, my garden and the dig. We were on our second martinis when she shook her head, frowning, and said, “Dorothy, if I could shake you. . . .”

Telling someone else about my situation made me wonder. Had I confused Alexis’s enthusiasm for the dig with enthusiasm for me? On my way home, I saw an ad for “He’s Just Not That Into You,” that book turned movie about women who refuse to see their relationships for what they are. When I got home, I was in a self-loathing tailspin.

Alexis returned from his evening, and I launched into an assault. “That book ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ — it was written with me in mind!”

He started laughing. I said, “You’re taking advantage of me.”

Alexis kept laughing. “You think this is about you? This has nothing to do with you. She’s my mother.”

“Actually, it does have to do with me, since it’s my garden, and if nobody says anything, I’m going to end up paying for your mother’s damage.”

He realized I meant it. Alexis had borrowed money from me a couple of years earlier. He agreed to repay me the next day. We also agreed that he would contribute monthly to household expenses. He promised that either he or his mother would pay whatever it cost to restore my garden to its former condition.

Though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, this was a turning point for us. His mother’s dig brought us closer. I learned that I could state my needs, and Alexis wouldn’t run away. And he started to listen.

Wall, meanwhile, reached the bottom of the privy. Her dig never produced the longed-for Burroughs manuscript, but there were wonderful small finds that we preserved and eventually stored in an elegant glass case that Alexis designed. There were clay pipes, combs carved from cattle bone, marbles, slate pencils, bone toothbrush handles, fake gemstones, a thimble, buttons, a glass apothecary bottle and even a pornographic Victorian figurine.

The dig left the yard a shambles, forcing Alexis to confront his mother one last time about the cleanup. She picked up her tools and left the rest. But the garden recovered, as gardens do, with help from my ingenious contractor, who realized that the main pit could be filled with large stones and repurposed into a giant drain. Alexis sketched a new patio layout, loosely based on the nave and the apse of a Renaissance church, and together we picked a durable paving stone that resembled washed limestone. The maple and the birch tilted with missing limbs. But they both survived. So, too, miraculously, did the spindly forsythia, clinging for dear life to the high wall at the end of the yard.

A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2013, on page MM78 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Raiders of the Lost Privy. Today's Paper|Subscribe